Psyche after Broadie
Psyche after Broadie: Soul, Act, and Catholic Anthropology
Sarah Broadie, born Sarah Jean Waterlow in 1941 and later known also as Sarah Waterlow Broadie, was one of the major modern interpreters of ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle. She studied Greats at Somerville College, Oxford, held academic posts at Edinburgh, Texas, Yale, Rutgers, Princeton, and St Andrews, and died in 2021 after a long career devoted to ancient philosophy. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003, and the Academy’s memoir describes her as a scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy whose work included major monographs on Aristotle and later studies of Plato. Her work is marked by a rare combination of philological care, analytic precision, and philosophical boldness. She did not treat Aristotle as a museum-piece authority, nor as a set of doctrines to be summarized from a distance, but as a living philosophical interlocutor whose arguments could still be tested, reconstructed, and pressed for coherence. Her scholarship ranged across metaphysics, ethics, psychology, cosmology, and theology, and she was especially known for bringing Aristotle’s technical distinctions into contact with the deepest structural questions: actuality and potentiality, soul and body, motion and causality, contemplation and action.
Broadie’s 1993 paper, “Que fait le premier moteur d’Aristote? Sur la théologie du livre Lambda de la Métaphysique,” appeared in the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, in a volume devoted to Aristotle, and was translated into French by Jacques Brunschwig. The title asks a deceptively simple question: What does Aristotle’s First Mover do? The paper contests a widely received interpretation according to which the First Mover of Metaphysics Lambda is primarily a contemplator whose causal relation to the first heaven is only final or exemplary. Broadie’s argument is that this contemplative reading burdens the text with unnecessary entities and activities. If the First Mover is pure contemplation, then another spiritual agent must be introduced to produce motion. Broadie instead argues that the First Mover in Lambda is better understood as a kinetic noetic agent, that is, a source of motion whose activity is not reducible to detached contemplation. The paper’s stated focus is narrow: the relation between the First Mover, the first sphere, and the motion of that sphere. Its implications, however, are much wider, because the argument requires a careful rethinking of soul, activity, embodiment, causality, and divine life.
This is where Broadie’s handling of psychē becomes unusually illuminating. The paper is not primarily a treatise on the soul. Yet, in order to explain why the First Mover should not simply be called the “soul” of the first heaven, Broadie has to clarify what Aristotle’s term psuchê means. That clarification becomes one of the most valuable features of the paper. The Greek term psychē, often transliterated psuchê or psyche, is normally rendered as “soul.” But Broadie’s treatment avoids the misleading modern sense of soul as a ghostly interior thing, a detached consciousness, or a separable mind lodged inside a body. For Aristotle, as Broadie presents him, psuchê is first of all a biological-metaphysical term. It names the principle by which an organized living body is alive and capable of its characteristic life-functions. In her summary of Aristotle’s De Anima, the soul is “la première actualité d’un corps organique naturel,” the first actuality of a natural organic body.
The importance of that formula lies in the word “actuality.” Psuchê is not one material part among other parts. It is not an additional organ. It is not a small invisible object inside the organism. It is the actuality by which the organism is a living whole rather than a heap of bodily materials. But it is first actuality, not necessarily full exercise. An animal asleep, a person not presently seeing, or a living being not presently moving still has soul because it retains the formed capacity for living operations. The soul is the life-form that makes possible nutrition, sensation, motion, desire, and in the human case intellective activity. It is life as structured capacity. It is not yet pure, uninterrupted active functioning.
Broadie’s distinction becomes sharper when she contrasts ordinary psuchê with the First Mover. The first sphere is not an organic body; the First Mover is not the first actuality of such a body. Rather, it is “actualité seconde,” complete functioning actuality. In ordinary organisms, first actuality and second actuality are distinct: the capacity to see differs from the act of seeing; the living state differs from each actual life-operation. In the First Mover, however, there is no dormant capacity waiting to be brought into act. There is no latent life-form that intermittently performs its operation. Broadie’s point is not that the First Mover is less than soul, but that the Aristotelian term psuchê is too tied to organic, intermittent, embodied life to name the First Mover strictly.
This yields a more subtle account of soul than a simple body-soul contrast. Broadie observes that modern readers tend to approach soul through questions of separability: whether soul is categorically different from body, whether it can exist apart from body, or whether it is somehow attached to body. She thinks that, in the Aristotelian context, a more basic distinction lies elsewhere: between life that acts intermittently in relation to environmental stimuli, and life that is absolutely independent and continuously active. Ordinary psuchê belongs to the first side. It is the principle of a living body whose activities occur under conditions: the animal sees when there is something visible, moves when desire and circumstance elicit movement, and acts within an environment. The First Mover, by contrast, is not externally stimulated into operation. It is uninterrupted noetic activity.
The value of Broadie’s account is that it prevents both reduction and exaggeration. On the one hand, soul is not reduced to matter. It is an actuality, not a material piece. On the other hand, soul is not exaggerated into a self-contained mind accidentally joined to a body. In ordinary living beings, the soul is “of” a body because its characteristic activities are bodily-involving activities. Nutrition, sensation, growth, and animal motion are not operations of an isolated soul that later happens to use a body. They are psycho-somatic activities. Broadie’s deeper formula is that the soul is the kind of vital principle that must express itself through such functions. The relation to body follows from the kind of activity sourced. This makes the soul activity-ordered: it is known by the life-operations it grounds.
This also explains Broadie’s treatment of the so-called “soul of the sphere.” The traditional interpretation of Lambda often inserts a second spiritual agent: the First Mover contemplates, while the soul of the sphere loves or imitates that contemplation and thereby moves the heaven. Broadie regards this as unstable. It forces the interpreter to posit an entity not clearly mentioned in the text, to multiply noetic activities, and to distinguish objects of desire in a way Aristotle does not do. Her question becomes: why not identify the First Mover with what interpreters have called the soul of the first sphere? But the identification is functional, not biological. The First Mover may be soul-like as the source of motion, yet it is not psuchê in the ordinary Aristotelian sense because it is not the first actuality of an organic body.
The final subtlety is that Broadie’s reading makes the First Mover, in one sense, more intimate to the first sphere than an animal soul is to an organic body. An animal body has material constituents that can persist after death; the organism dies, but its matter remains. The first sphere, as Broadie reads Lambda, has no such independent physical existence apart from the eternal motion caused by the First Mover. Its existence as the first moving heaven is through and through dependent on the Intellect-Mover. This is why Broadie can preserve both the separateness and the causal intimacy of the First Mover. The First Mover is beyond sensible things because what it causes, eternal cosmic motion, is not available as a finite object of perception; yet the sphere’s existence as physically actual depends upon it. The result is a highly disciplined account of psuchê: soul as organic first actuality, First Mover as pure active noetic source, and the analogy between them governed by activity rather than by crude placement inside or outside a body.
This study of Broadie’s paper can serve as a propaedeutic to a Catholic treatment of soul. It does not make Broadie a Catholic anthropologist, nor does it collapse Aristotle into Christian doctrine. Rather, it supplies a refined grammar for asking what kind of term “soul” is. Is soul a biological principle, a metaphysical actuality, a spiritual substance, a rational principle, a form of the body, or the immortal subject of post-mortem existence? The answer depends on the register. Broadie’s Aristotle clarifies the biological-metaphysical register: psychē is life-as-first-actuality. The Catholic sources then receive and transform that grammar within a doctrine of creation, imago Dei, Christology, death, and resurrection. When taken together synthetically and then finally Christologically, a central insight emerges: redemption perfects not the soul away from the body, but the human person as an ensouled body before God. Let’s see how we get there through two key Catholic sources.
The Catechism of the Council of Trent gives the first Catholic comparison. Its treatment of soul is not primarily a neutral account of life in general. It is a theological anthropology. Man’s soul is created by God in His image and likeness, gifted with free will, and ordered so that motions and appetites are subject to reason. In this register, the soul is not merely that by which a body lives; it is that by which the human being stands before God as image, free agent, sinner, redeemed creature, and resurrection-bound person. The Tridentine account therefore adds a vertical axis that Broadie’s Aristotelian treatment does not contain. Psuchê as first actuality explains organic life; the human soul in Trent explains rational-spiritual life under God.
Trent also insists on immortality. The Creed says “resurrection of the body,” not “resurrection of the soul,” because the soul does not die in the way the body dies. The Catechism of Trent argues that one of man’s two constituent parts, the body, corrupts and returns to dust, while the soul remains immortal. Yet this does not produce a crude dualism. The soul survives death, but it is not the whole man in final perfection. The Catechism of Trent says that the soul is “part of man” and has a natural propensity to be united to the body. Its perpetual separation from the body is unnatural. Hence resurrection is not an optional appendix to immortality; it is required by the nature of the human being as body and soul.
This is a decisive contrast with any disembodied spirituality. For Trent, the separated soul is real, living, and capable of happiness or punishment, but the completed human person requires bodily resurrection. The body must rise because it was the partner of the soul in moral action: the soul governed and willed, but the body shared in acts of virtue and sin. Divine justice therefore concerns the whole human being. In this way, Trent preserves both the priority of the rational soul and the dignity of the body. The soul is spiritual and immortal, but it is not meant to remain alone.
The Christological dimension intensifies the point. In the Incarnation, Christ’s true humanity requires not only a body, but a rational soul. The Catechism of Trent teaches that Christ’s sacred body was formed and united to a rational soul, so that He was perfect God and perfect man. This means that the human soul is not an optional psychological feature. It belongs to the integrity of human nature. If the Word assumes humanity, He assumes body and rational soul together. The human soul is thus not only an anthropological term but a Christological safeguard: without a rational human soul, Christ would not be fully man.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives the same doctrine in a more systematic contemporary form. It begins from the unity of the human person: the human being is at once corporeal and spiritual, and “man, whole and entire,” is willed by God. The CCC’s direct definition says that “soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man. It also states that the human body shares in the dignity of the image of God because it is animated by a spiritual soul. The body is therefore not a prison or disposable instrument; it is the visible bodily reality of the same person.
The CCC’s most Aristotelian-Thomistic formulation is that the soul is the “form” of the body. Because of the spiritual soul, matter becomes a living human body; spirit and matter are not two natures merely fastened together, but their union forms a single nature. This line directly resonates with the Aristotelian framework clarified by Broadie, but it shifts the register. Broadie’s psychē is the actuality of an organic body. The CCC’s soul is the spiritual form of the human body, immediately created by God, immortal, and ordered to communion with God. The CCC also teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God, is not produced by the parents, does not perish when separated from the body at death, and will be reunited with the body at the final resurrection.
The CCC’s Christology confirms the same body-soul grammar. Against errors that diminished Christ’s humanity, it teaches that the Word united to Himself flesh animated by a rational soul and that Christ is perfect in humanity, composed of rational soul and body. It also confesses the full reality of Christ’s human soul with its operations of intellect and will. Against Apollinarius, the Church confessed that the eternal Son assumed a rational human soul. Christ therefore thought with a human mind, acted with a human will, loved with a human heart, and lived a complete human interior life.
The resulting thesis can be stated as follows: Broadie’s analysis of psychē provides a disciplined biological-metaphysical baseline for understanding soul as actuality, life-principle, and source of embodied operations; the Catechism of Trent and the Catechism of the Catholic Church receive this kind of act/body grammar but elevate and specify it within Catholic doctrine, where the human soul is the rational, spiritual, immortal, immediately created form of the body, made in the image of God, incomplete apart from bodily resurrection, and Christologically confirmed in the assumed humanity of the Word. Broadie clarifies what soul cannot mean if it is to remain philosophically coherent: not a ghost, not a detached mind, not a vague spiritual force, not a mere body. The Catholic sources clarify what the human soul must mean in the economy of creation and redemption: not merely organic first actuality, but spiritual form, rational freedom, personal interiority, imago Dei, and resurrection-oriented life.
This thesis guides the study after Broadie. Broadie’s contribution is not replaced by the catechisms; it becomes a clarifying threshold. Her account teaches that soul-language must be controlled by act, body, and the kind of life being named. Trent and the CCC then show that, in the human case, the kind of life being named is not merely organic life but spiritual-personal life before God. The human soul animates the body, but also grounds reason, freedom, moral responsibility, openness to grace, and the capacity for communion with God. It survives death, but its separation from the body is not the goal. It is the form of the body, but not reducible to biological organization. It is spiritual, but not a complete human person apart from the body. In Christ, this doctrine receives its highest clarity: the eternal Son assumes a complete human nature, body and rational soul, and thereby confirms that human salvation is not escape from embodiment but the healing, elevation, and glorification of the whole person.
Bibliography
Broadie, Sarah. “Que fait le premier moteur d’Aristote? Sur la théologie du livre Lambda de la Métaphysique.” Translated by Jacques Brunschwig. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 183, no. 2 (April-June 1993): 375–411.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.
Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests. Issued by order of Pope Pius V. Translated by John A. McHugh, O.P., and Charles J. Callan, O.P. New York: Joseph F. Wagner, 1923.
Coope, Ursula. “Sarah Broadie.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 22. London: British Academy, 2024.
University of St Andrews, Department of Philosophy. “Sarah Broadie (1942–2021).” August 10, 2021.